If you’ve been trying to get your hands on one of Nvidia’s new RTX 3080 or 3090 cards, and aren’t willing to pay exorbitant resale prices, you may want to resign yourself to waiting until 2021.
As Tom’s Hardware reports, in a Q&A call earlier today Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that the company is expecting the current shortages of the new top-end cards to last “through the year”.
“I believe that demand will outstrip all of our supply through the year,” he said during the press call. “Remember, we’re also going into the double-whammy. The double-whammy is the holiday season. Even before the holiday season, we were doing incredibly well, and then you add on top of it the ‘Ampere factor,’ and then you add on top of that the ‘Ampere holiday factor,’ and we’re going to have a really really big Q4 season.”
(The ‘Ampere factor’ is the fact this next generation of cards are fiddlier and more difficult to manufacture).
Ah, but what about the 3070, perhaps the most desirable of all the new cards given the way it hits that sweet spot between cost v performance? Well, it’s now been delayed, Kotaku Australia reports, and now won’t be out until October 29.
“We know this may be disappointing to those eager to purchase a GeForce RTX 3070 as soon as possible, however this shift will help our global partners get more graphics cards into the hands of gamers on launch day,” Nvidia says.
After the clusterfuck that was the 3080 launch, that sounds like a good idea! Provided, that is, Nvidia and other retailers have used the time to implement some of the basic anti-bot practices sneaker stores have already been using in similar circumstances for years.